At the beginning of next year, the launch of the initial phase of Ethereum 2.0 is taking place. On Tuesday, during the 80,000 hours podcast devoted to solving the most pressing problems in the world of cryptos, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a speech in which he commented on this event and shared his ambitious plans for Ethereum.

According to Buterin, he is ‘very confident’ about the launching phase of Ethereum 2.0, however, he is not sure about the incentives that make people use blockchain.

About Ethereum 2.0

The launch of Ethereum 2.0 includes a lot of stages, with the initial phase scheduled for January 3, 2020. As we have reported earlier, the Ethereum 2.0 combines important projects like Proof-of-Stake (PoS), sharding, and eWSAM.

The transfer of the Ethereum consensus protocol to Proof-of-Stake means new rules for validators to secure the blockchain network that presuppose the usage of digital currency deposits. With sharding, the entire network will be broken into shards – small units that share the same PoS consensus and are able to act as a separate blockchain with its own smart contracts and transaction history.

As for eWASM, it represents an alternative to the currently used Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). In comparison with EVM, eWASM is able to double the transaction throughput rate.

When all the three aspects are delivered, Ethereum 2.0 will facilitate a number of on-chain transactions while maintaining key aspects of decentralization and security.

Great Prospects For Ethereum

As Buterin said, the new network aims to run ‘tens of thousands of transactions per second.’ But at the same time, he is worried about whether people would use the new Proof of stake network in a decentralized way or choose another option and assign their stake to an exchange. He commented:

“For example, are people just going to be lazy and run all their staking nodes on AWS? Are people going to be lazier and just do all their staking by sending their money to Binance, and Binance are going to stake for everyone? Are people going to stake in ways that are insecure and lead to a bunch of people getting hacked at the same time? And how decentralized is it actually going to be?”

It is not a secret that Vitalik Buterin is very optimistic about Ethereum. In general, he believes that the potential of Ethereum 2.0 is really great. He is excited about the new version of Ethereum that can become the world’s computer. Earlier, Buterin said:

“Ethereum 1.0 is a couple of people’s scrappy attempt to build the world computer; Ethereum 2.0 will actually be the world computer.”

He added:

“Blockchains as they currently exist are in many ways a joke, right? Like 15 transactions per second… you’re not going to run the world economy on top of that… So I’m definitely just really excited about turning Ethereum into a system that we can really, fully be proud of.”

During the podcast, Buterin also spoke about the up-and-coming Libra created by Facebook. He pointed out that stablecoins are more reliable than they seem to be and from the technical point of view, Libra is just the same as Ethereum, however, its base layer security is not at the highest level, that’s why Facebook should do something about it.